Solus 3 released with Budgie Desktop 10.4; Ships with support for snap packages

Mr Joshua Strobl on behalf of Solus project has announced release of Solus 3, 3rd iteration of independently evolved rolling GNU/Linux distribution. This release brings various under the hood optimizations and visual improvements to make it the best operating system for laptops and desktop computers.

Vertical panels in Solus 3 Budgie Edition

Unlike previous snapshot releases of Solus, Solus 3 follows an hybrid release model. In addition to package updates expected in a rolling snapshot, it ships various new features and enables support for modern hardware stack by providing a recent version of Linux Kernel.

The main highlights of Solus 3 can be briefed as:

Finally supports snap packages. The Solus 3 release provides complete support for snap packages, a universal packaging format for GNU/Linux distribution. This was made possible by seamless collaboration between snapcraft, Solus team and Ubuntu developers. Solus is the first non-canonical distribution to provide complete support for snap packages.

Budgie 10.4. This is one among most notable highlight of Solus 3. Budgie 10.4 was expected to be a bug fix cum maintenance release in 10.x series. But is more than that. Budgie 10.4 brings various new features such as support for vertical panels, minimize-maximize animations, completely redesigned application menu based on experiences with Brisk Menu for Mate Desktop ..etc. All highlights of budgie desktop 10.4 is topic for a separate post.

Solus 3 GNOME Edition is using latest GNOME stack available till date. It uses GNOME Shell 3.24.3, Mutter 3.24.4, and Nautilus 3.24.2, ..etc and continues to use various extensions to provide delighted user experience. It also includes Plotinus a searchable command pallet for Gtk3 applications.

There is no much visual changes in Solus 3 MATE edition. Though you can avail all the under the hood improvements in MATE edition as well.

For more detailed information on each feature and corresponding illustrations, see original release announcement published in Solus blog.